THEATER: Diamond in the rough draft at XX Playlab Fest

Wednesday

Mar 20, 2013 at 12:01 AMMar 20, 2013 at 8:23 PM

If you attend the XX PlayLab Festival – three days of new play readings, March 22-24, at the Boston Center for the Arts – you just may catch a preview of Cambridge playwright Lydia Diamond’s next Broadway-bound play.

Alex Stevens/CORRESPONDENT

If you attend the XX PlayLab Festival – three days of new play readings, March 22-24, at the Boston Center for the Arts – you just may catch a preview of Cambridge playwright Lydia Diamond’s next Broadway-bound play.

Oh, that’s not her goal. In fact, Diamond is very humble about her Broadway success. It was just two years ago that her play "Stick Fly" landed on Broadway after an acclaimed run with the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston.

For any playwright, a Broadway run is an astounding achievement; for an African-American woman, it’s historic.

"African-Americans have been poorly represented on Broadway," says Diamond. "I walked into a bit of history. It was big and overwhelming. I got a lot of attention all at once. I received an intense amount of good will and support. I felt like I was in the middle of this momentous occasion while I was just trying to go to work, just trying to make a good play."

And if all that weren’t enough sensory overload, Diamond also found herself at the center of a swirl of industry bigwigs. Imagine the stress, jokes Diamond, of trying to look good in a photo when you’re standing with Alicia Keys.

Diamond remains humble about it all. Indeed, words like "lucky" and "fortunate" and "privileged" tend to pepper her speech as she talks about her playwrighting successes. And she hits another level of humility, or generosity, when she addresses the idea of a return to Broadway.

"It would be hubris to expect that it would happen again," she says, then adding, "It’s someone else’s turn."

The new work that she’ll be presenting at the XX PlayLab Festival, co-produced by Company One and the Boston Center for the Arts, is "Smart People." And even if it isn’t Broadway-bound, it’s certainly Huntington-bound. The prestigious Boston theater company has announced that it will produce "Smart People" as part of its 2013-2014 season. But, before then, audiences are getting a chance for a special sneak peak, a chance to see the play in a developmental stage, and perhaps even a chance to help the playwright shape her work.

That’s what’s happening at the XX PlayLab Festival, where Diamond will be joined by female Boston playwrights Kirsten Greenidge and Natalia Naman as the three present their works-in-progress. And "Smart People" has been quite a process for Diamond. The play follows four Harvard intellectuals, including a neuroscientist who’s trying to find out if prejudice is innate. Many of Diamond’s previous plays poured out of her – she was writing as many as two a year – but life has a way of slowing the creative process. She’s now a mom and a fulltime playwrighting professor at Boston University, so her output has understandably slowed. And she’s wrestled with "Smart People" right from the start.

That’s where you come in. A staged reading is a way for a playwright to receive feedback from actors, directors, dramaturges and an audience. The PlayLab readings this weekend will be followed by discussion sessions that will help Diamond better understand, and perhaps reshape, her own play.

"There’s really nothing more important for a playwright than to hear their play in a safe environment," says Diamond. "And the audience may be the most important part of that process, because those are the people you’re writing for. There’s no sense in [getting the response] of just a bunch of theater people."

While the talk-back section of the evening usually provides valuable feedback from the audience, Diamond says she gets just as much information while standing in the back of the theater, listening to the audience.

"When are people laughing? Do they cry? Those are such hugely informative moments," says Diamond.

She adds that playwrights who live in this area enjoy an additional benefit at staged readings: The audiences are wicked smaht.

"Boston audiences tend to be intelligent and engaged," she says.

Those two adjectives also describe Company One. Artistic director Shawn LaCount has lots of highlights from his first 12 years of leading the theater company, and one of the most notable is that he recognized Diamond’s talent and he did something about it. Company One was the first troupe to stage her work, providing the first step on her road to the Huntington and then Broadway.

It’s a mutual admiration society.

"Company One has found their audience and they’ve defined themselves beautifully," says Diamond, who now serves on Company One’s advisory board. "I’m really lucky to have a relationship with them. They’re the first company to produce me. And they also did my play ‘Voyeurs De Venus.’ That’s a difficult play to stage and they did it beautifully."

The small but respected theater company has a proven track record of showcasing new talent. When it’s pointed out to Diamond that Company One doesn’t seem too interested in the work of dead white male playwrights, Diamond responds, "As a living black female playwright, I’m on board with that."